At present, in the specified field of transmitting data in the form of packets in a network, a transmission path (also known as a transmission channel or route) is generally selected allowing for a single evaluation criterion, which is not necessarily the best one, as there will often be several criteria pertinent to the selection process, associated with different required properties or characteristics.
The above kind of selection process is not the optimum process in the particular situation where two or more contradictory criteria are pertinent to the choice of a transmission path but only one of them is used to make the selection.
The routing or transmission path selection protocol most frequently used is the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol, which uses a Dijkstra algorithm that is particularly suitable for Internet Protocol networks, or a derivative of that algorithm.
Those prior art algorithms can take only one evaluation criterion into account in each selection procedure, that criterion being cumulative in the sense that the weight representing the evaluation of each path analyzed corresponds to the sum of the individual weights of the arcs of the path concerned.
There is currently a requirement for routing in Internet Protocol networks based on simultaneous and sometimes contradictory routing or selection criteria, for example transmission time, distance, cost, stability and load balancing in the network used.
There are multiple criteria decision or selection methods, of course, and these could be used in multiple criteria selection operations for choosing an optimum transmission path, possibly representing a best compromise, in the light of different criteria.
However, processing all paths by such multiple criteria methods would require a very large number of complex processing operations, calling for commensurate computing power and leading to disproportionate delays and costs that would be unacceptable in the field to which the invention relates.